Rick Kelly tied with Coulthard for the unofficial round win after a highly emotional triumph in Race 13.

Just four days after Nissan announced the impending end of its support for Kelly Racing and exit from Supercars, Kelly was in the right place at the right time when leader McLaughlin slipped wide at a late restart.

The win, a first for the 2006 champion in 210 races, was somewhat fortuitous but his Castrol Altima had genuine pace and Kelly was mistake-free and cool under pressure in the final laps.

Race 14 was a similar story, but on that occasion Car #15 took the chequered flag in fourth after losing time in traffic during the middle stint of the 67-lapper.

The Walkinshaw (Andretti United) resurgence continues to be spearheaded by Scott Pye, whose finishes of second and sixth at Winton leave him sixth in the championship.

Pye adopted a similar approach to van Gisbergen in Race 13, pitting two laps earlier at the end of Lap 25, and ended up challenging Kelly for victory in the final laps.

Car #2 was perhaps not quite as sharp the following day but the South Australian maintained his starting position of sixth in net terms and collected the equal-fourth-highest points haul for the event.

Anton De Pasquale became the first driver to outqualify David Reynolds as an Erebus Motorsport team-mate when he put Car #99 ninth on the grid for Race 13, his fourth top 10 start in five races.

On Erebus’ first genuinely poor weekend of this season, it was the rookie who performed the better overall out of the team’s two drivers, though Reynolds was plagued by a mechanical problem on Sunday which saw him qualify last.

Lowndes’ weekend was an unfortunately familiar tale of having to make something of bad qualifying positions, though Triple Eight in general struggled to achieve good starting positions.

The veteran raced much better, picking up net 11 positions in each race.

He finished particularly strongly in Race 14, shaking out 19th after the pit stops before a climb through the midfield which ended with Car #888 eventually passing Will Davison for 12th after hounding the 23Red Falcon for several laps.

Despite finishing both races outside the top 10, the misfortune of others means that Lowndes is now third in the championship.